Family Man up…aw, you know. There’s a page.

Page 172 now online!

And here is another page.  There’s some more personal complication coming up – one surgery (not on me), the final dregs of a move (guys I own so many books and so many cats), the looming con season, several other projects which will come into maturity any moment now and demand all the attention, etc, but DAMMIT HERE IS A PAGE.

With a barn swallow.  Or a bit of one, anyway.

In the meantime, because I’m too harried to come up with many salient words right now, I’ve been occasionally dropping interesting pictures in my long-neglected Tumblr account.  If you enjoy pedantic imagery of the past, heave to!

Family Man update!

Page 171 now online.

There once was, and there will be again, a time where I post something other than just updates to the comic.  Now is not that time, however.  I’m working on getting myself feeling a little more grounded over all, which means I’m going to be scarcer than usual online for the next little bit, here.  (Dear everybody I’m currently working on stuff for:  it is, in fact, happening!)

Meanwhile, please enjoy another page in which wildlife gets the better of our young protagonists.  Next:  notes!

And now, to bed.

Family Man update!

Page 170 of Family man now online!

At last, at last, at laaaaast, an update.  Let’s not think about how long it’s going to take me to wind down from all the tea I’ve had tonight, shall we?  Some costs cannot be estimated.

What a month, guys.  I’m slowly digging my way out.

Take Care of Yourselves.

Hello, gang.

It’s a rough time for us here in the Northern hemisphere of developed world; we’re all accustomed to a smoother time than this, aren’t we? The economic woes and the wars and the darkness and the general feeling of societal dis-ease and distrust.

If you are a person (like many of us) who already deals with depression or other mental distress, or who has experienced specific pain and turbulence of late, no doubt those effects have only been underlined.  I myself have been swamped with grief and miasmic anxiety this past month.

In the last month, two members of my family have committed suicide (one indirectly, by way of longterm self-neglect and substance abuse; one very intentionally, after a long struggle with suicidal depression).  Two other acquaintances, people with active roles in their communities and a creative outlook on life, have also recently killed themselves.

Please, my dears.

If you’re struggling, if you are in pain, if the normal palliatives of family and friends and work and all those things we’re supposed to do to “cheer up” have failed you:  please, please please, please, seek help.

Whether that is calling a crisis line, seeking professional help (even if you’re uninsured and broke, it does exist), scheduling a check-in routine with somebody you trust, revamping an old medication, lightbox, or exercise regimen, talking to a spiritual adviser, going running with a friend, anything that counts as telling another person what is going on and asking for help in taking action:  please do it.

The world does need you.  Please do whatever it takes to keep you present and whole.

Find a social worker near you.
Call the national suicide prevention hotline to talk to somebody near you.
Search for health clinics near you, including free and low-cost.
GLBT-friendly therapists, spiritual support, and other resources.

Family Man update!

Page 169 now online!

Hell of a week, gang.  Sudden death in the family, moving to a new house, all that jazz.  But here is  page!  Huzzah.

More later.

Monday Morning Poem: A Hole in the Floor

A Hole in the Floor

for Rene Magritte

The carpenter’s made a hole
In the parlor floor, and I’m standing
Staring down into it now
At four o’clock in the evening,
As Schliemann stood when his shovel
Knocked on the crowns of Troy.

A clean-cut sawdust sparkles
On the grey, shaggy laths,
And here is a cluster of shavings
From the time when the floor was laid.
They are silvery-gold, the color
Of Hesperian apple-parings.

Kneeling, I look in under
Where the joists go into hiding.
A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.

The radiator-pipe
Rises in middle distance
Like a shuttered kiosk, standing
Where the only news is night.
Here’s it’s not painted green,
As it is in the visible world.

For God’s sake, what am I after?
Some treasure, or tiny garden?
Or that untrodden place,
The house’s very soul,
Where time has stored our footbeats
And the long skein of our voices?

Not these, but the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known:
That spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask love-seat
And the whole dangerous room.

– Richard Wilbur
photo by Jon Feinstein (site)

——-

Generally the poems I pick for the occasional Monday appearance are connected to something very literal in my life.  It’s a way for me to process happenings (from the silly to the significant) and recontextualize them however I feel the need.  Sometimes I know exactly the poem I need to post; just as often I simply type “[topic] poem” into the search field and keep sifting until the right thing presents itself, which it invariably does.  The oracle of Delphi had nothing on Googlemancy.

But, the literal-ness:  this past weekend I ripped up, often with considerable violence, a lot of old carpeting and linoleum in the home I’ll be officially moving into this month, to prepare it for brand new floors.  I am not designed to take such things unmetaphorically, and the bare board that the work exposed feels parallel to all the getting-started going on in my life at the moment, and to the “buried strangeness” that is the mysterious continuity of self in the face of flux.

Family Man: she updates!

Page 168 now online.

Behold!  I am reinstalled in my life here in Portland and almost out from under the massive backlog of orders, business chores and work; tomorrow I might even unpack the suitcase.  Luckily for my sanity, I get to ease back in with another one of these handy chapter transition images.  Next week we’ll have Luther and the library and hijinks will ensue.  Hurray!

Then the week after that I’ll be due for another round of page notes, although they might be a bit scanty given the hunting interlude.  (I do promise I’ll post links to the rabbit skinning tutorials I found on YouTube.  Like a banana, gang.  They peel like a damn banana.)

I’m still scrumming around for a reliable, quality printing company with good communication skills, located outside of this here continent (with prices to match).  If you’ve had any good or bad experiences printing a publication in four colors with an overseas printer, please pass that information my way, so I can locate a solid vendor and have a Family Man book for sale at San Diego this year.

Art sale!

Hey all!  I’m experiencing one of those Freelance Moments(tm) where I’m short on cash despite being heartily employed.  Solution:  art sale!

I traditionally hate parting with original art, particularly from comics projects and especially when it’s not an in-person sale; it’s a little easier when I design something to be given away or when I get to meet the person taking it home!

So this is your excellent chance to snag some art from me if you don’t typically make it to conventions.

Up for sale on Etsy, everything from convention doodles to original art from Click.

The scans are on the murky side so that you can see the pencil lines underneath the inking!  These are slightly visible in real life so you and your friends can TELL it’s original art.

Monday Morning Poem: “Requiem for the New Year”

Requiem for the New Year

Fathers and daughters have been much on my mind these last two weeks.  Caring for my father has been exhausting, far more than it would seem to be when described in writing.

I’ve watched his face wax yellow with frailty and drain white with nausea and flush crimson with effort. I’ve counted off every one of his one-hundred and eighty daily leg exercises, reminded him to breathe deeply, to relax his hands, face, shoulders.  I’ve seen him speechless with chill and fatigue and agony, press headphones full of jazz onto his ears so he could be at least partially disembodied, reincarnated as a coil of blue cigarette smoke rising from Dexter Gordon’s ashtray as he played ‘Round Midnight for the studio men in 1986.

I’ve estimated the angles of his knees as he gripped the arms of his chair and quaked with effort.  I’ve held his hand while a stranger calmly pried thirty staples out of the flesh of his leg.  I’ve filled his prescriptions for Vicodin and for a blood-thinning medication that is also a popular ingredient in most commercial rat poison.  I walked down a long clinic hallway with him, step by step, stopping three times for him to catch his breath.

I’ve had him lean on my shoulder as he struggles to turn and climb back up a sequence of four steps, repeating to himself the which-leg-goes-first mantra  “down with the bad, up with the good” which he had trouble remembering – painkillers render his short-term memory not unlike it had been before he quit drinking – until I pointed out to him that a man with a PhD in religion should be able to remember the phrase if he thought of it as a moral statement.  Down with the bad!  Up with the good! In Jesus’ name, Amen.

I have brought him an eternal cycle of icepacks and pressed them against the great angry violet swaths of bruising on his thigh, awoken him at two in the morning to remind him to take medication, cleaned the toilet after he shits, emptied his catheter bag.

I’ve helped.

I love my father.  The foretaste of his mortality and potential dependency, as reflected in the aftermath of this painful but entirely elective, entirely constructive procedure, has been a bitter one.  Being away from my life, wrapped in the cocoon of his condition, ceasing to exist at moments as anything other than my father’s helper, has been an alienating, distressing, and precious experience.    How do other people adapt to being reshaped as caretakers of loved ones who are in permanent states of distress or disability?

For those who do so with grace, who negotiate self-negation with self-preservation, who give comfort and take it in equal measure, who are guardians of dignity and protectors of vulnerable intimacies; who perform the alchemical magic of transforming love into care,

I give thanks.

Spirit Photographs

One of my favorite ridiculous phenomena of the Victorian Era:  the spirit photograph. You could pay money to be photographed and have the supernatural forces around you revealed on a silver plate, be it ectoplasm or be it a mournful feminine face lost a diaphanous swath of otherworldly chiffon.

To the contemporary eye, they’re hilariously, magnificently fake; half-baked tricks of photographic exposure.  To me, they’re the perfect combination of anthropology and art, like old sci-fi movies set in a now outdated future.  They’re trying to envision something separate from their time and place – death, the year 1995 – but, hampered by their own chintziness, never achieve the escape velocity that real works of speculation or awe do.  We are looking at the lowest common denominator for how Victorian-era people (those who could afford a photograph, anyway) conceived of the afterlife.

Their origins are very cynical, these photos, but their falseness has now become quaint and pathetic.  Most of these photographers knew that they were scamming customers, but I wonder how many of them were lulled into thought that they were doing a pretty good job at interpreting an actual spirit world. Just helping it along, as it were.

For, example, of this photograph, the National Media Museum makes this note:

“The image of a young man’s face appears prominently over the man, draped in a cloak. The signature at the base of the image belongs to the sitter. The man had links with the person who compiled the spirit album, and he gave the photograph to her as a keepsake. He apparently recognized the young man’s face.”

Did any of these photographers avoid either the pure cynicism of a scammer or the self-delusion of being the spirit world’s darkroom assistant, and instead settle on the middle notion that they were simply giving people comfort?

“A photograph of a mourning scene, probably taken by William Hope (1863-1933) in about 1920. A woman mourns for her husband in a Chapel of Rest, standing by his body which is wrapped in sheets and laden with flowers. The woman’s son stands beside her. The image of a man’s face has been superimposed over the original photograph. The spirit album notes that the family were Roman Catholics and believed in life after death.”

It does make me think about where we we might ourselves, here in this smug moment of the present, be sitting (unbeknown to us) on a little velvet chair, waiting for the nice man to take the exposure and show us another world – above, below, ahead.  And about how the effects of sorrow are the same in any time and any place.